Need opinion on managed hosting bandwidth fees (very high traffic site)

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Posted by nrau, 04-18-2006, 08:07 PM
I am currently doing an eval for a managed hosting provider to support our operations. Our site is growing quickly and we have the potential to have our traffic quickly escalate. Right now we are serving about 150GB of data a month but I expect that to be above 1000GB by the end of the year. We are going to start with a fairly robust environment with multiple servers to provide us with the redundancy and load balancing we need. I am looking at really the highest level managed hosting players who can provide enterprise, mission critical service. My question to you guys is around bandwidth fees. The first pricing responses are coming back from the vendors and we've been seeing bandwidth prices in the range of $2 per GB after we exceed an initial allotment of 200GB that is baked into our baseline prices. How does this compare to what you guys have seen? Has anyone had any experience with sliding scale prices as your bandwidth levels escalate? Thanks for your input.
Posted by SDC-Eric, 04-18-2006, 09:12 PM
When purchasing bandwidth by the GB, most high end providers will give you lower rates for bandwidth purchased in advance, and higher rates for overages. So to get a beneficial sliding scale you need to estimate your bandwidth usage, accurately.
Posted by bruce1234at, 04-18-2006, 09:16 PM
i reckon you should be able to get better than $2 per GB for extra bandwidth once you've gone over your initial allotment
Posted by Maja85, 04-24-2006, 02:35 PM
Are you doing anything in the area of music streaming? But, try shalall net they have unmetered bandwidth.
Posted by erigid, 04-27-2006, 07:06 PM
1TB is usually what's given per server. If you get a private switch and put multiple servers in it, some hosts will let you pool the bandwidth and get 1TB * n where n is the number of servers in your cluster.
Posted by SimonDurkee, 04-27-2006, 09:12 PM
We charge $1/gb for all dedicated servers. I wouldn't pay more than that. Simon Durkee Terrasite.com
Posted by reiteration, 04-28-2006, 03:21 AM
Its always best to buy your bandwidth in advance, otherwise you end up paying through the nose for overusage. Better to have too much than too little. John
Posted by darksoul, 04-28-2006, 10:06 AM
I don't think we can call 1000GB a month "very high traffic site"
Posted by dkitchen, 04-28-2006, 03:25 PM
If that's 1000GB of text, it's a high traffic site ... 1000GB of data transfer however is not a large amount. You must note there is a difference between traffic and bandwidth. The standard with most servers is around 1000GB (1TB) these days. You may want to get quotes from other providers and explore your options. $2/gb is quite an expensive overage, and does suggest to me the provider either has very good bandwidth, or is overselling massively and needs to make make back any losses on overages. Dan
Posted by erigid, 04-28-2006, 03:59 PM
Heheh, I agree. So many people use it interchangeably, including myself, to refer to data transfer. I think is because new users and experienced users understand it. Also if you use for example 1TB/mo that now becomes the bandwidth using months as the unit of time which would be the equivalent of ~3.1 Mbps.
Posted by EntropyGrid, 05-27-2006, 06:19 PM
No, it wouldn't. Providers typically bill based on 95th percentile transfer. (Whether that's in, out, max of the two, or sum is another story.) Because web traffic is bursty, transferring 1 TB/mo requires closer to 10 Mbps for typical traffic patterns. There's no exact formula to convert between 95th percentile of and transfer. Consider the analogy of driving around town. One doesn't drive the speed limit all the time; actual distance (transfer) is notably less than speed (bandwidth) times time.
Posted by taylorwilsdon, 05-27-2006, 07:22 PM
Since when is a terabyte high traffic? You shouldn't have a problem finding a cheap server with a terabyte of properly sold bandwidth for a very affordable cost.
Posted by mripguru, 05-27-2006, 07:31 PM
and have it managed by the company too?
Posted by erigid, 05-28-2006, 12:49 AM
lol. Please read my post correctly. I just did a unit conversion from TB/mo to Mbps. I never said that to transfer 1 TB in a month you would require at 3.1 Mpbs line.
Posted by EntropyGrid, 05-28-2006, 03:36 PM
I thought I had. Oh well. I'd have said equivalent of 3.1 Mbps mean, then, clarifying what the 3.1 Mbps meant. At any rate -- no pun intended -- many people forget to account for the duty cycle. It happens frequently on mailing lists and forums, including in another contemporary WHT thread, so I wanted to be sure everyone remembered the bursty nature. Yes, I'm pedantic.